Review: The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow

[Russ Allbery]

The Ten Thousand Doors of January
by Alix E. Harrow

Publisher: Redhook
Copyright: September 2019
ISBN:      0-316-42198-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     373

In 1901, at the age of seven, January found a Door. It was barely more
than a frame in a ruined house in a field in Kentucky, but she wrote a
story about opening it, and then did.

  Once there was a brave and temeraryous (sp?) girl who found a Door.
  It was a magic Door that's why it has a capital D. She opened the
  Door.

The Door led to a bluff over the sea and above a city, a place very far
from Kentucky, and she almost stayed, but she came back through the
Door when her guardian, Mr. Locke, called. The adventure cost her a
diary, several lectures, days of being locked in her room, and the
remnants of her strained relationship with her father. When she went
back, the frame of the Door was burned to the ground.

That was the end of Doors for January for some time, and the
continuation of a difficult childhood. She was cared for by her
father's employer as a sort of exotic pet, dutifully attempting to
obey, grateful for Mr. Locke's protection, and convinced that he was
occasionally sneaking her presents through a box in the Pharaoh Room
out of some hidden kindness. Her father appeared rarely, said little,
and refused to take her with him. Three things helped: the grocery boy
who smuggled her stories, an intimidating black woman sent by her
father to replace her nurse, and her dog.

  Once upon a time there was a good girl who met a bad dog, and they
  became the very best of friends. She and her dog were inseparable
  from that day forward.

I will give you a minor spoiler that I would have preferred to have
had, since it would have saved me some unwarranted worry and some
mental yelling at the author: The above story strains but holds.

January's adventure truly starts the day before her seventeenth
birthday, when she finds a book titled The Ten Thousand Doors in the
box in the Pharaoh Room.

As you may have guessed from the title, The Ten Thousand Doors of
January is a portal fantasy, but it's the sort of portal fantasy that
is more concerned with the portal itself than the world on the other
side of it. (Hello to all of you out there who, like me, have vivid
memories of the Wood between the Worlds.) It's a book about traveling
and restlessness and the possibility of escape, about the ability to
return home again, and about the sort of people who want to close those
doors because the possibility of change created by people moving around
freely threatens the world they have carefully constructed.

Structurally, the central part of the book is told by interleaving
chapters of January's tale with chapters from The Ten Thousand Doors.
That book within a book starts with the framing of a scholarly
treatment but quickly becomes a biography of a woman: Adelaide Lee
Larson, a half-wild farm girl who met her true love at the threshold of
a Door and then spent much of her life looking for him.

I am not a very observant reader for plot details, particularly for
books that I'm enjoying. I read books primarily for the emotional beats
and the story structure, and often miss rather obvious story clues.
(I'm hopeless at guessing the outcomes of mysteries.) Therefore, when I
say that there are many things January is unaware of that are obvious
to the reader, that's saying a lot. Even more clues were apparent when
I skimmed the first chapter again, and a more observant reader would
probably have seen them on the first read. Right down to Mr. Locke's
name, Harrow is not very subtle about the moral shape of this world.

That can make the early chapters of the book frustrating. January is
being emotionally (and later physically) abused by the people who have
power in her life, but she's very deeply trapped by false loyalty and
lack of external context. Winning free of that is much of the story of
the book, and at times it has the unpleasantness of watching someone
make excuses for her abuser. At other times it has the unpleasantness
of watching someone be abused. But this is the place where I thought
the nested story structure worked marvelously. January escapes into the
story of The Ten Thousand Doors at the worst moments of her life, and
the reader escapes with her. Harrow uses the desire to switch scenes
back to the more adventurous and positive story to construct and
reinforce the emotional structure of the book. For me, it worked
extremely well.

It helps that the ending is glorious. The payoff is worth all the
discomfort and tension-building in the first half of the book. Both The
Ten Thousand Doors and the surrounding narrative reach deeply
satisfying conclusions, ones that are entangled but separate in just
the ways that they need to be. January's abilities, actions, and
decisions at the end of the book were just the outcome that I needed
but didn't entirely guess in advance. I could barely put down the last
quarter of this story and loved every moment of the conclusion.

This is the sort of book that can be hard to describe in a review
because its merits don't rest on an original twist or easily-summarized
idea. The elements here are all elements found in other books: portal
fantasy, the importance of story-telling, coming of age, found family,
irrepressible and indomitable characters, and the battle of the primal
freedom of travel and discovery and belief against the structural
forces that keep rulers in place. The merits of this book are in the
small details: the way that January's stories are sparse and rare and
sometimes breathtaking, the handling of tattoos, the construction of
other worlds with a few deft strokes, and the way Harrow embraces the
emotional divergence between January's life and Adelaide's to help the
reader synchronize the emotional structure of their reading experience
with January's.

  She writes a door of blood and silver. The door opens just for her.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is up against a very strong slate for
both the Nebula and the Hugo this year, and I suspect it may be edged
out by other books, although I wouldn't be unhappy if it won. (It
probably has a better shot at the Nebula than the Hugo.) But I will be
stunned if Harrow doesn't walk away with the Mythopoeic Award. This
seems like exactly the type of book that award was created for.

This is an excellent book, one of the best I've read so far this year.
Highly recommended.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2020-05-25

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-42198-7.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>